The Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology realizes direct communications between machines, for the objective of enabling all the machines to have the networking and communication capabilities. Thus the M2M technology has a very important significance, with broad markets and wide applications.
Currently, most of the M2M devices are fixed and will not be moved frequently. The communication traffic is not high, and the number of times of data transmissions is not large. For devices such as electric meter and water meter, the data only needs to be reported once a month through the wireless network, and the data transmission amount is also very small each time. However, the absolute quantity of the M2M devices is too large, and how to manage the communications between so many M2M devices and the wireless network is one of the problems to be solved at present.
Currently, the mechanism of communications between the M2M and the wireless network may be classified into Push and Pull. The Push mechanism means that the M2M terminal actively initiates a communication with the network side and reports data. The Pull mechanism means that the network side actively initiates a communication, and requires the M2M terminal to report data. In the two basic communication modes, when the Pull mechanism is adopted, the wireless network side can effectively control the communication traffic and prevent the congestion caused by a lot of terminals accessing the network simultaneously. Thus the Pull mechanism becomes the main communication mode of M2M.
When the Machine Type Communications (MTC) application server needs to collect data, it sends “Pull request” to the access network. Herein many types of network elements may be interacted with the MTC application server, and finally the request will be sent to a base station which notifies the MTC device to report data.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, according to existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication procedures, the MTC device is in the IDLE (idle) state at ordinary times, and when an eNB needs to request the MTC device to upload data, it sends a paging message to the MTC device. After receiving the paging message, the MTC device initiates a random access to establish a Radio Resources Control (RRC) connection and a data bearer, then transmits user information through the data bearer, cancels the bearer and deletes the RRC connection.
The prior art at least has the following deficiencies:
Although the MTC device reports very little data each time, it still requires the whole procedures for establishing connection and bearer. Thus, the data volume of signaling occupies a very large proportion in the data volume of all the air-interface communications, and the transmission efficiency is low.
In addition, since there are a large number of MTC devices and each MTC device makes a random access, a lot of random access resources are occupied, thus the probability of collision in the random accesses increases, and the communication experiences of other normal terminals will be influenced.